It occurred to me, probably a lot later than it should, that this will be a nuclear weapon against freedom of speech and illegal file-sharing. Is this possible?
Net neutrality is nearly, but not entirely, orthogonal to efforts to control unlawful internet activity; its about neutrality among lawful uses.
It's more about ISPs acting like cable companies where you are forced to pay for different service tiers. If you want to watch youtube or netflix you have to pay extra otherwise they will throttle your connection to those sites. A lot of ISPs where I am (not in US) already throttle default torrent ports for most of the popular clients like utorrent/bitTorrent so p2p file-sharing is already a target.
I'm not a fan of south park (a popular comedy show in the US) but the creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are pretty smart guys. They will never censor content for anyone. If they do, it will lead to a slippery slope where others will demand the same privilege. If we give up even an inch on this then pages and files will become so latent they won't even be worth accessing.
No. If anything, I would expect net neutrality to benefit pirates.